Notes and reviews about hardware

The reviews contained or listed in this page are usually
my personal impression of the notable aspect and the
overall worth of the things described rather than in depth
ones.

After some wavering I have decided not to remove obsolete
entries, but to mark them as such, if I notice they are obsolete
and I remember to mark them. Obsolescence here means the stuff is
no longer available or not at the noted price.

Older hardware reviews

In the post-festivities sales at the beginning of the year I
found a good offer for a Toshiba
U300-13U
laptop, a very portable laptop with a 13.3" screen,
2×1.5GHz Core 2 chip, 2GiB of RAM, and 160GB of disk.

Overall I am quite happy with it. Some good points:

Quite light and thin.

Quite powerful configuration.

The screen is quite legible, bright and has a good
resolution of 110DPI,
which means that antiliasing is even less necessary.

The keyboard has clear keys with black lettering, which
makes it rather more readable in low light, which often
happens when travelling.

The flash memory reader supports the
xD format,
which is what my Olympus camera
uses.

The disappointments are:

The most annoying is that the button that opens the CD/DVD
drive protrudes from right hand side, and thus it is very easy
to press it, in particular if one stores the laptop tightly.
The Dell
Latitude D620
has a recessed button for that reason, and it is so much
better.

The default battery is only a
four cell 4000mAh
one. This means a rather shorter than expected life at around
2-3 hours of light use. Obviously this laptop should have by
default the
6 cells 5200mAh
battery (which I have promptly bought).There is also a much
bigger
9 cell 7800mAh
battery that really qualifies as an accessory. I suspect that
the default is the weaker battery for two reasons:

To keep the total weight of the laptop just under 2kg
(it is declared as 1.99kg), which is the conventional
limit of the ultraportable category.

To induce a significant portion of the customers to buy
a higher margin accessory (as the base unit is
competitively priced).

The network interface only supports 100mb/s, instead of
1gb/s, which is disappointing even for home networks.

The screen vertical viewing angle is rather small. This is
because it looks like the backlight comes only from the
bottom, so viewing the screen from above makes it washed out
and from below rather dark. Fortunately it is not too
difficultto tilt the screen until it is good.

As some reviewers point out:

The keyboard flexes in the middle.

The top of the case flexes in the corners above the
CD/DVD drive and the ExpressCard slot.

The screen is quite reflective.

A relatively small number and type of ports, due to the back
being devoid of them as the screen flips into it.

MS-Windows Vista instead of XP. Or rather that I have to pay
a few dozen extra pounds for something I don't really
use.

Overall I like it more than the Dell D620, where some points of
comparison are:

The U300-13U is nearly half the price.

The U300 is somewhat smaller and lighter.

The build quality of the D620 is much better.

The U300 has a much brighter screen with rather
better colour rendition, but the D620 has a matte surface
instead of a reflective one.

The U300 has fewer but newer sockets, which may be an
advantage or not.

Like with all laptops one should buy with it a spare battery, a
spare charger, and at least one backup external disk, and also
eventually an extended warranty.

I have already got the external backup disks; I shall buy an
extended warranty near the end of the initial warranty (it would
be very annoying to pay for an extra two years and warranty and
have the laptop destroyed or stolen in the first year).

I have bought as spare the Toshiba
6 cells 5600mAh
model, and for a charger a
Targus compatible model.
Considering how critical the battery is, and how dangerous a
faulty battery can be, and how easy they are to design poorly or
with bad materials1, I think that a third party battery can be an
excessive risk. Buying a random power supply can also be
dangerous, but I reckon that it is a lesser risk, and anyhow
Targus
are a fairly high end supplier with a reputation (and margins)
to defend.

The list of GNU/Linux specific tweaks I have used is:

Use of the ipw3945 driver and dæmon
(superceded by the iwlwifi one).

Applied the patch described in
Method E
to the
ALSA
ALSA 1.0.14 on my Linux 2.6.23 version.

Used the intel driver of X.org 7.2, which works
but only in XAA mode (EXA has an annoying rendering bug), and
which crashes if using DRI.

The current version (Linux kernel 2.6.25) of the
iwlwifi driver does not associate automatically
with 802.11a APs which
is really rather inconvenient.

Linux kernel release 2.6.25 with the
X.org release 7.3
now does accelerate OpenGL using DRI.
Quake III
class games work well and fast, but
Doom3
and
Quake4
class games find some OpenGL extension missing.

There is now an updated
U400 series
with some few updates, for example better build quality
especially about flex, but regrettably a black keyboard
instead of a silver/white one.

I tend to find most comfortable when sitting somewhat high with
respect to keyboard and mouse, so that my elbows are higher than
either; this means that usually my legs tend to dangle down from
the seat.

Having been a bit swamped with things to do recently, I have
had to sit for longer times than usual, and this has been
painful, because the edge of the seat than cuts into my
thighs, even if I take frequent breaks.

I have tried two solutions. The first is standing up while
using screen and keyboard; this work very well and results in
avoiding the problem completely, but it rather tires my feet,
which then ache; I wonder how shop assistants cope.

The other solution has been to try one of those
kneeling chairs, specifically a
Teknik Office posture chair
(SKU 309854) which is one of those who try to improve posture by
having the sitting person rest their weight in part on a
kneeling pad.

I usually have a good sitting posture in part because I am
careful to have my monitor at eye level, and not much below, but
the idea attracted me because it means that the weight of the
person rests not so much on buttocks and thighs but also on the
knees, and also the legs are not horizontal and point down.

Well, I was a bit disappointed because of two issues:

The higher seat tend to remain too near to level, thus
cutting into thighs too. I found that this can be fixed by
raising it, which also inclines it forwards, but raising it of
course means that one ends up sitting too high relative to the
desk. The problem is that the higher seat is not tiltable, but
is fixed to the beam on which it is connected. Well, I avoided
the issue by removing the front castor wheels, which both lowers
the chair and tilts it forward.

The pad where the knees or the forelegs rest has an
excessively soft cushion which means it compresses against the
wood base too easily. This results in aching knees or forelegs
fairly quickly, I guess until one gets used to it. This seems
to be a common problem, and a friend solved it by removing
the padding and replacing it with a cutout from the kind of
dense foam mattress used by backpackers.

Also one of the seams of the upper seat ripped soon (probably
all too weak sewing).

Well, neither solution is perfect, but both are better than an
ordinary chair. The Teknik product has some issues, but it
avoids my main problem, and is fairly cheap for a chair, so I
think that overall it is fine, but I say this a bit
begrudgingly.

The
Zalman Fanmate2
is a little device that allows controlling the speed of
fans that use the usual 3 pin berg connector style.

Like all the devices of its type it does so by
changing the voltage supplied to the fan, and it changes
the voltage by applying variable resistance, which means
it reduces the power supplied to the fan by dissipating
it into heat.

Thus the major issue with such devices is how hot they
become. Well, the Fanmate2 behaves very well here: it
can dissipate enough to support fans drawing up to 6W,
and most fans draw at most around 2W. Indeed with two
such fans in my PC (CPU and case fans) the Fanmate does
not even feel warm.

It is possible to see a pretty huge heatsink inside
the little perforated box that is the body containing the
electrical bits, which surely helps a lot. I had tried
some other mainfestly poorly built fan voltage control
device and it would get very hot, by contrast.

The Fanmate2 also has the considerable advantage of
having a quite long cable, which allows great flexibility
in positioning the box with the control dial; I have for
example put them in an otherwise unused 5.25" slot on
the front of my case, for easy access when tuning the
speed of the two fans.

Overall so far the Zalman Fanmate2 has been an
excellent choice, way better (which mostly means cooler)
than others, and still fairly cheap at around £4
each. The only limitation that I can see is that it does
not support directly fans that have a 4 pin Molex
connector, but it is fairly easy to get 4 pin to
3 pin cables.

The No NameULT31311
is an external enclosure for 3.5" disc drives with an
external brick style power supply.

It uses a
ProlificPL3057
chip for both USB2 and IEEE1394 bridging to ATA.

It is fairly cheap and convenient, with a clamshell
style case that is easy to open and close, but which
also seems to be very ugly.

The power supplys is one of those cheap 12V ones that
tend to burn out, and is rated at 2.0A, which is not too
bad but would not support many 3.5" hard discs that
require more power.

The PL3057 chip is a bigger issue, as its IEEE1394 side
is, according to my experience and many others reported
on the web, practically unusable because of poor
reliability. Some people report that updating the
firmware in the chip may improve it, but that are
contradictory reports even as to that.

The USB2 side of the PL3057 chip actually works fairly
decently and with good speed.

Overall I was not that happy with this enclosure, but
then the same power limits and reliability problems are
pretty common.

The No Name (probably Triumph)
TT-346U2F
is an external USB2/FW enclosure for 5.25" and 3.5"
disc and CD/DVD drives; it has an USB2 to ATA chip
from ALi, the
M5621,
and a FW to ATA chip from
Oxford Semiconductor, the
OXFW911.

It also has an internal power supply rated at 1.8A for
12V.

The bad points are:

The M5621 chipset seems incompatible with several
USB2 host chipsets, and/or some ATA hard drives. It
seems to work better with CD/DVD drives though.

The power supply's rating of only 1.8A at 12V may
cause issues
with many higher capacity or performance hard discs.

The tiny fan is rather loud.

Overall I like this box, even if it is a bit annoying
to open and close, but both slightly differentw variants
that I have seen (I bought two of these boxes) look
faily good and robust.

The internal power supply is a lot more convenient than
an external one, and the 5.25" form factor means that it
can house a CD/DVD drive or a
5.25"-to-3.5" disc drawer.,
and the OXFW911 IEEE1394 chipset is fast and reliable.

This is a combined ADSL modem, wireless AP, and 100MHz Ethernet
switch, with firewall and routing. It is a rebadged product from
the Far East, and very similar variants are also sold by SMC and
3com. Indeed many models of these variants are firmware
compatible, which is good because the Belkin firmware seems
rather buggy and incomplete to me.

The good thing is that it is fairly cheap (I paid £80 at
the local Comet shop in Oct. 2004, and it costs only a little less
from mail order companies). It also works fairly well and it is
easy to set up, with fairly sensible defaults customised for the
UK.

Apparently it is also quite reliable and not crash prone
(except for cooling problems, which are easily fixed, see
below) like other similar products.

It has some bad points though:

Fast repeated DNS queries by a DNS server running on a host
behind the firewall trigger flood protection, which
is very annoying. Even more annoying is that quickly repeated
HTTP requests also trigger SYN flood protection, again from
inside the firewall (which runs ar 100Mb/s with <1ms
latency, that is very fast). This to me seems eminently moronic.
I think that the only obvious way to avoid this is to
disable what is called the firewall,
provide some protection, and it is a quite safer to rely on
per-host firewall software than one just at the gateway.
Unfortunately if that is disable the
DMZ
feature is disabled too.
However see below for access to hidden menus that might be
contain configuration parameters that can be tweaked to avoid
this.

The port forwading menus are clumsy, and it might be in any
case better to simply enable the
DMZ
feature to designate a node as an externally visible server,
which is practically necessary if one uses one of several and
important protocols that do not traverse well
NAT
gateways. Unfortunately to enable the DMZ one has to enable
the firewall and this causes trouble with
overzealous flooding detection. Anyhow even so the DMZ feature
simply seemed to be permanently disabled.

The device is silent because it has no fan, but the heatsink
is the metal base plate on the bottom, and since heat
rises, the device is prone to overheating. The solution is
very simple, and it is to keep it vertical and not horizontal,
and this requires a simple holder, which is not supplied. I
use a letter holder, and that is fine.

There is no display of the statistics, either traffic or
status, of the ADSL line, like error rate, up and down speed,
SNR and attenuation, which are very useful to diagnose line
problems.
However see below for access to hidden web pages that
do contain ADSL statistics.

There is no display of the statistics, either traffic or
status, for the wireless AP.

By default it does not keep the line up if there is no
traffic for a little while. This provokes a reconnection delay
when traffic starts again, and while the delay is usually one
or two seconds, on some ISP it can rather longer as their
authentication servers are often undermaintained and
overloaded.
However, with the latest firmware release, this rather
annoying thing can be configured away, for PPPoA in my case,
in the
WAN>Connection Type>PPPoA(Routing Mode,
for multiple PCs) for the UK form.
Unfortunately this form is partially broken for PPPoA in
that the dial-on-demand and idle-timeout values are ignored,
as checking with this
undocumented status page
shows, but there is a workaround: the otherwise almost identical
WAN>Connection Type>PPPoE(Routing Mode,
for multiple PCs) form
sets the dial-on-demand and idle-timeout values correctly, and
the values it sets apply also to the PPPoA case, so one can
first set them in the PPPoE form and then submit the PPPoA
form without changes.
While there it may also be useful to further reduce the
MTU to 1400, but the default of 1454 seems already good. That
the default is less than 1500, to account for PPP and L2TP
header overheads, means that the people who do the firmware
have more than usual clues.

The led that indicates whether the ADSL line is connected or
not does not flicker to indicate traffic on that line, while
the similar LED for wireless and Ethernet does.

Another review points out that
the wireless AP is somewhat weak
but not that bad. I'd rather have a lower power transmitter
that lasts longer. Also, in my experience it is better than
what the review says, but perhaps I have thinner walls.

Hi, the German C'T magazine nr. 23 of 2004 gives
the cause of these problems in a exhaustive comparative test
of 19 wireless 54G modem/routers. I quote translated:

Errors in DNS relays lead to peculiar problems. Some
routers crash when opening specific Ebay pages. This is
related to the customer monitoring system used by Ebay.
This system does not use cookies, but customer data
encrypted inside DNS queries instead.

It requests names, comprising name-parts separated by
periods within some labels, being up to 63 characters
long. This complies with the DNS standard of 1987 (RFC
1034), however not for some router programmers in 2004 who
designed routers with less memory space for using labels.
Direct result: Buffer Overflow and Router crash. In the
test this applied to the 3COM, Belkin and SMC wireless
routers.

By looking at the source of the web pages of the user interface
I have formed the impression that it is quite badly written by
rather unskilled people, and this might explain why it seems to me
rather awkward and buggy. Reading the impression of the various
people who have looked into the firmware update files also gives
me an overall sense of shoddy work.

The final impression I have got is that I should have gotten a
Netgear or Linksys instead, as they are far more configurable and
informative (Linux based...), but then I read bad things about the
reliability of many Linksys and some Netgear models.

All in all I am going to keep it. It works most of the time
despite the bugs, and its reported hardware reliability is
somewhat more important to me than customizability.

I found important to at least upgrade the firmware to the
latest version, which as I write seems to be
V.A.1.08.03UK (Jul 8 2004 15:41:37)
because this allows configuring the disconnect-on-idle timeout
and the MTU for PPPoE, PPPoA and similar connection types.

But after some long frustration I decided to try and load as
some
other users
have done the
firmware for the equivalent 7804WBRA
router from SMC, and what a change.
Not only the user interface is much better organized, it is far
more complete, and less buggy (it is still written in a way that
to me seems very poor). Also virtually all the most annoying
bugs with the Belkin firmware seem fixed in the SMC one.

Note: one annoying bug remains: while the DMZ
option works, the flood protection continues to be applied to the
internal interface, and even if it is disabled for the external
interface. The protection gets triggered by TCP connection rates
higher than 300 connections per minute, or 5 per second,
which is absurdly low, as just opening a page with half a dozen
images will trigger it. As with the Belkin version of the firmware
this can only be avoided by disabling the
firewall entirely, and then one loses the
DMZ. But there is a workaround: in the NAT section, under
Virtual Servers it is possible to forward all ports
(1-65535) one-to-one under both TCP and UDP to a
given internal host, which is the same as DMZ for a single
external address. Since I have only one external address that
is fine for me. Perhaps full DMZ functionality can be obtained
by using the Address Mapping feature in the same NAT
section.

On top of all this the
7804WBRA manual
is well written, complete, documenting all the options and
expalining them tersely but correctly. I am going to buy SMC in
the future rather than Belkin.

Note: a number of people have also discovered
(1,
2)
that Belkin have licensed a generic and fully featured ADSL
firmware used also by SMC, and that Belking have removed from
the main web configuration page the links to a number of really
useful control pages, and here is a list of these:

Pretty good display quality, with many nice details: DVI input
with DVI cable included, the power supply is builtin, the base is
telescopic and contains an USB hub, narrow bezel, fairly good
analog autosync, the base can be removed leaving a standard 100mm
VESA mounting plate, for example for a telescopic arm, and it has
very little to no trails/ghosting when playing games or movies.

Almost the only defect is that backlighting is slightly uneven,
with the edges of the screen being brighter, but this is almost
unnoticeable. A secondary issue is that the display is somewhat
fuzzier on the VGA input; but it is supposed to be used in DVI
mode. Those monitors that only have a VGA input tend to have
better VGA input quality.

This card
is a quality USB2 plus IEEE1394 host adapter for the PCI
bus.

Major advantages:

Three external USB2 sockets and two external IEEE1394 ones
one card.

Both USB2 and IEEE1394 internal sockets, which makes it
easy to have a front panel with either or both.

Power connector so it can be a powered hub for fairly
power hungry peripherals that draw more than what can be
supplied via the PCI bus.

Uses a NEC EHCI chipset for USB2
(uPD720100A)
and a Texas OHCI chipset for IEEE1394
(TSB12LV26)
that are well supported under recent versions of
Linux, and are quite reliable.
Unfortunately the NEC EHCI chip has a well
documented defect (apparently it can only support half
duplex on the PCI bus) that makes it one of the
slowest USB2 chipsets.

It comes with a good quality bundled 6-to-4 pin IEEE1394
cable which can be pretty expensive if purchased separately.

The only big disadvantage is that it is somewhat expensive; but
compared to two separate cards it is rather more convenient, and
the features are rather better thought ought than other combo
cards.

The speed and output quality are quite good both in
monochrome and color mode, and on plain paper too. B&W
output quality on good plain paper is amazingly good.

It is well supported under Linux, and supply their own
binary driver that is really quite good, even if not very
Unix-like.

There are three disadvantages, two large (one of them is not
confirmed) and the other small:

According to a
reviewer
some Epson Stylus Color printers (he mentions the 580) have a
built in logic that disables the printer after a certain
amount of use (the metric is the number of head cleaning
operations):

After 1 year and 1 month the printer broke down: "unknown
error has occurred bring the computer to a service center".

Of course this was too expensive. I looked on the
internet and found out that at least hundreds had the same
error. The official epson site personel did not know
anything, they say. i found out that the epson 580 and other
epson printers are more or less programmed (EEPROM) to stop
after a certain time.

This time depends on the number of times it has used ink
to clean the head. In short, it probably wants to prevent
that ink is leaking onto the desk, and therefore - btw thank
you Epson - tells the printer to stop printing and so buy a
new printer. It displays a message that nobody understands
and at Epson they of course say they dont know what is wrong.

This sounds rather appalling especially as it is not
documented, except in this rather unofficial
web site.

The ink cartridges are chipped, which makes it more
expensive or annoying to use compatible ink. The cartridge
design also makes it a bit more annoying to do refills.
Fortunately there are now pre-chipped compatible ink
cartridges, but this comes at a (small) price.

The output resolution is based on 360DPI (actually 72DPI
originally) and even multiples or submultiples. Most
scanners and other digital devices are based on 300DPI and
even multiples or submultiples, which may result in some non
even scaling of the image.

All in all I am fairly happy with it, but I think I should have
gone for a Canon inkjet instead, as they have much lower ink
costs even if they cost about 50% more to purchase. Another
alternative would have been a slightly more expensive HP inkjet,
like a 940c, which does not use chipped cartridges and they are
easy to refill too.

The KG7 is one of the better Athlon motherboards, if what one is
looking for is solidity rather than flashy features. Its main
advantages are:

It supports ECC memory. This is very important;
unfortunately there are very few Socket A motherboards
support it, and they tend to be all AMD 761 chipset
based. Most VIA chipsets also support it, but most VIA
motherboards don't.

Six PCI slots and four DDR-DRAM slots. This gives more
options for expansion and customization.

All power regulators are switching.

According to a reviewer the presence of six power
transistors means that the onboard power supply is triphase,
which helps stability. Indeed this board is rather more stable
than my previous Soltek, which was fairly new anyhow.

The usual excellent jumperless CPU setup menu of ABIT
motherboards.

It can be found for pretty low prices. The Lite version,
which has only two DDR-DRAM slows, can be bought for 41
pounds including taxes.

Pretty good layout, with a number of case fan sockets
and good positioning of the CPU and most sockets. I think
the better proximity of the CPU to the back and top of the
case (case fan and PSU fan) is the reason why my CPU runs
now about 5 centigrade cooler than with my previous
motherboard. This may also be because the power regulators
being switching no longer become hot.

The main disadvantage is that it uses DDR-DRAM, which is twice
as expensive as SDRAM. If you want to use SDRAM, the best bet
may be one of the few Socket A motherboards that support both
SDRAM and DDR-RAM.

Another advantage is that the bracket with the sockets for
the second USB host adapter is bundled. Unfortunately the IR
bracket is not included, and is hard to find.

The few recent Socket A motherboards that support ECC seem
to be all based on AMD chipsets, and are mostly expensive dual
processor ones. The ABIT KG7 is together with the EPOX 8K7A the
only cheap uniprocessor socket A motherboard that supports ECC
and has six PCI slots. The EPOX seems nice, but some power
regulators are non switching, so I went for the ABIT. Another
two uniprocessor socket A motherboards support ECC, the Gigabyte
XXX and the DFI YYY, and the both trade stupidly a PCI slot for
an AMR or CNR slot.

This is based on a Promise PDC20269 chipset. It is OK and well
supported by recent Linux kernels. The ATA133 support is largely
pointless, so one could buy the similar ATA100 board by Promise,
which can be found for somewhat cheaper.

In brief: quite good, well supported under Linux ALSA (but
they need software sharing). The mixer structure is simple
enough, which of course help a bit with ALSA that by default
gives a raw view of any card's mixer.

For some people they are the cheapest (and really cheap
usually) way to get full optical and coaxial digital
SPDIF/IEC958. The CMI 8738 based
Trust 514DX has a full set
of digital inputs and outputs, for example. But the gameport
does not work (known defect, never fixed).

The sound quality is good for the price, even if it has
limits at high frequencies. The CMI8738 chip is really
48kHz only, even if it can accept and produce 44.1kHz,
but using 44.1kHz should not be done as it involves
low quality resampling, sometimes twice.

The MS Windows drivers seem to me to be quite slow though;
seems better under MS Windows 2000 than 98.

This is a UK magazine, not a web site, but it does fairly good
technical tests and it is also fairly cheap. Other magazines
with fairly decent reviews are
PCPlus and
PC Format
but both are significantly more expensive, and PC format's
reviews are less technical.
Personal Computer World
and
Computer Shopper
are also fairly good with nice reviews.

XBitLabs reviews are as a rule stunningly informative, with
a weath of data and explanations that make it not just a
review site, but also a place where one can learn about many
interesting aspects of contemporary hardware technology.
Reviews like their survey of
power consumption of graphics cards
address important subjects that are often disregarded by other
reviewers, and with a wealth of insight.

Tom's Hardware is a bit the “light” version of
XBitLabs, addressing much the same themes but rarely reaching
the same level of technical discussion, even if it is often
higher than most other review sites.

This site does daily news about games and the game industry,
and it is very good for that, but it also does daily links to
recent hardware reviews, mostly of items of interests to
gamers, but not just.